Primary Menu

Closing your eyes and creative relaxation

I often use binaural beat technology in my audio recordings to help people experience relaxation more deeply and easily.

Binaural sound, creating 3D landscapes in a listener’s inner ear, is something that crops up in the news every now and then. The BBC did some broadcast experiments back in 2013, and now it’s getting some more attention in the fields of advertising and entertainment.

Binaural sound is this year incorporated into virtual reality headsets used by South Africa Tourism UK to foster an immersive experience of heightened suggestivity, that is not a million miles away from standard hypnosis work that involves creating inner alternative realities for therapeutic purposes. Instead of selling a patient a new and healthier vision of themselves, the VR headset sells five-minute taster sessions of holiday packages, including diving with sharks and abseiling down Table Mountain as well as a less-adrenalin intense experiencing of street food, music and wine.

The ability of sound to induce vivid inner realities is also relevant to the theatre. The Stage reports on the use of audio technology by director David Rosenberg, and sound designers Ben & Max Ringham. In an interview, the trio discuss how they’ve used sound to create immersive realities for audiences over the years and how much more effective the technique is when used in darkness.

This makes sense from a hypnosis and relaxation perspective – eyes-closed relaxation enables more attention to be paid to aural inputs such as music, sound effects and the spoken word, while also enabling the creation of inner landscapes with their own visual, auditory and kinaesthetic dimensions.